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ocated on the western edge of Australia’s Great Victoria Desert, the Granny Smith Gold Mine is all that you would imagine an Australian mining community to be. Set in a hot and arid landscape of reddish brown soil and sparse scrub, it is roughly 950 kilometres inland from the state capital Perth, and 23 kilometres from the mining town of Laverton, a community that has grown up to support the mines of the region. The magic of the area is that for a few weeks every spring this semi-desert landscape bursts into stunning colour when the spring rains bring a variety of wild spring flowers into bloom. Established some 21 years ago, Granny Smith is a mature mining facility that has produced over six million ounces of gold—yet it has the potential to produce a great deal more. “We have mined a total of 12 open pits in this area during our lifetime, and we are now mining underground,” explains general manager Julie Shuttleworth. “This underground deposit is very large, and we’re still expanding it both in width and at depth.” The long term strategy for Granny Smith is to continue expanding the life of the mine through ongoing exploration—both underground and above ground—and ironically, this is being aided by the difficult global economic situation. Over the past five years gold prices have been rising continuously, so it has become economically viable for the company to revisit some of the old worked-out pits and examine the feasibility of extracting the lower lying ore that simply hadn’t been a viable proposition previously.